Barbarians on the loose

We cannot summon words strong enough to condemn the horrendous beheading of Kanhaiya Lal Teli by two barbarians, Mohammad Riyaz and Ghouse Mohammad, in Udaipur on Tuesday. Certain that they were defending Islam by beheading the poor tailor, the self-styled 21^st-century warriors of Islam filmed the gruesome act and posted the video on social media. This was not all. For good measure, they intoned in the video that they were coming next for PM Modi. Apparently, a few days ago the victim’s ten-year-old son had forwarded a message purportedly endorsing the remarks of Nupur Sharma in a television show. Despite the ruling party and the government distancing itself from those remarks after, belatedly, the petro-dollar-rich Islamic countries had reacted adversely, it would have helped clarify the situation if some Islamic scholar had come forward to pronounce whether or not what she said bore any relation to the truth or was based on hearsay. For, a popular television Islamic guru based out of Malaysia has been widely quoted saying virtually the same things for which Nupur Sharma was forced to go underground for fear of attacks by the likes of Mohammad Riyaz and Ghouse Mohammad. It is no less significant that one of the beheading-perpetrators was employed in a local mosque.

Whether the house of god should be associated even remotely with such persons is for the ummah to consider. Being covenanted secular-liberals, we can have no say in the matter. As for the Gehlot government, less said the better. The local police had arrested Kanhaiya Lal Teli after he forwarded, according to him, by mistake the tweet supporting Nupur Sharma. The complainant was a local Muslim. The police maintained they had amicably settled the matter and Teli was released on bail. But when the death threats did not stop, he did not open his shop for a few days while he sought police protection. The police casually dismissed him, remarking that nothing would happen. Clearly, the police did not reckon with the barbarians lurking not very far from them. They did what they had set out to do, believing it all to be in the defence of Islam. Unfortunately, despite leaders of various political parties, including of the Islamic sects and, of course, AIIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi, decrying the killing, there is a genuine fear that the heinous killers could be treated as heroes by a section of the Muslims. Remember how ordinary Pakistanis valourise the security guard who had killed his protectee Governor for his criticism of the persecution of non-Muslims under the controversial anti-blasphemy law. In the case of the Udaipur murder, blanket demonising of Nupur Sharma, who said what she said after extreme provocation and mocking of her own faith, and, more importantly, merely repeated what had been part of the Islamic oral history for centuries, the one-sidedness of the controversy might have persuaded characters like Riyaz and Mohammad to pursue jihad in the hope of what awaited them in “Jannat”.

As Arif Mohammad Khan, the Kerala Governor and a rare voice of sanity in a community held in thrall by the mullahs and the maulvis, said, unless the thousands of madrassas are made to modernise their teachings, there can be no stopping germinating “martyrs” like Riyaz and Ghouse in the factories of zealots. If we are not to become another Pakistan, we need to ensure that our children are taught a modern, 21^st century education. Of course, religious teaching has its place in madrassas but that should not be at the cost of imparting education in modern arts and sciences and wider world cultures and religions. Unfortunately, the public discourse, especially in the English language media, is so distorted that even moderate pro-majority voices are muted into insignificance. The public intellectuals ranting about “judicial barbarism” by the highest court in the land expose their own blindness to the unvarnished truth that the Sangh parivar mostly draws its sustenance from the narrowness of the Indian Muslim. Mohammad Zubair, the AltNews founder, had only forwarded a tweet which was allegedly found to hurt the feelings of the Hindus. And the police action that followed had the entire secular-liberal crowd denouncing the government in one voice. But when Kanhaiya Lal Teli forwarded a tweet allegedly hurtful to the Muslim sentiment, and for which he too was duly arrested by the Rajasthan police, no one came forward in his defence. Meanwhile, since AltNews claims to fact-check, how come it did not think it right to fact-check the veracity or otherwise of Nupur Sharma’s remarks. But then, double standards and duplicity are the ornaments our secularist-liberals display proudly on their chests. Meanwhile, we might note here the loud silence of the same suspects when a Navi Mumbai-based television actress was thrown in the jug for over a month for a mere tweet, admittedly distasteful but not offensive, about the facial look of a senior NCP leader. Small wonder, then, the secular-liberal pretenders are so cut off from the ordinary people.